This website consists mostly of reflections of an older Catholic husband on marital intimacy. Why? First, marital sex is an important part of life, and of my life, so I want to understand sex better, especially the human side of sex - connecting the physiological with the emotional and psychological and intellectual and spiritual I am frankly shocked by how shallow much of the material about sex online is. But I am also sometimes struck by my own lack of understanding – for example, when I try to figure out what exactly “sexual pleasure” means. Obviously, there is a certain core idea we all understand, but a bit of reflection shows how much more complicated it is than simple physical reactions. I want to share insights and even just the questions or complexities with others. It is natural to want to know how others experience sex and understand it. I also want to think about and discuss how to “do” sex well – not in terms of sexual technique, but humanly. What does it mean to be a good person and a good husband in this particular area of married life? And, among other things, that means seeing how marital relations fit into life more broadly – into the overarching framework of reality that we see. (It is amazing how little the internet has on this kind of question.)

This website is not about sex in general, but about marital lovemaking. That has tremendous consequences. One of the most important is the kind of woman we are talking about here. What lovemaking is like depends a great deal on the character of that woman. There are such deep differences among intercourse with a loving wife, a girlfriend who is a possible wife, a girlfriend with an indeterminate future, a friendly acquaintance, a hookup, or a prostitute. They have a common core, of course, but how could they be the same? I’m not sure how useful it is to look at sex in isolation from its proper context – for example, at “sex between a man and a woman”, rather than “sex between a husband and wife” – because that “colors” or affects the experience so much. The context doesn't just add something, but transforms everything. I’m not interested that much in what “average sex” is – what’s typical of most people. (What is the average length of an orgasm or the average time it takes to make love.) I want to know more about a good man who is a husband making love to a good woman who is his wife. There is so much talk about sex in our contemporary culture, and especially on the internet, and especially of a more technical kind – what are the right “techniques”. But, interestingly, it’s just not clear whether there’s any more sexual satisfaction today, although that is widely assumed. For the record, it’s worth recalling there is no way to know for sure – we just don’t have any solid “empirical” data for sexual satisfaction until very recently – what we have is relatively little, and all anecdotal. What we do have in our society today – which is suggestive – is a lot of people constantly obsessed with how to have “better sex” (usually meaning more extended periods of sexual pleasure or more intense orgasms). If we have so much more sexual satisfaction today, now that we are liberated from our repressive past, why do people spend so much time talking about it? Why does Cosmopolitan’s front page every month have something about “The Moves You Make That Will Drive Him Wild!” Apparently, whatever you learned before wasn’t enough.

One thing about this website has to be clear: there’s no pretense here that there are final or complete answers. Aside from the futility of trying to achieve that with such a complicated topic, there’s always the fundamental point we have to come back to: people – all of us – are different. We have some things in common, but there is a uniqueness to every person, and so also a uniqueness to every couple. But, having recognized that, the things we have in common may make it possible to learn from each other. And I hope this website can contribute to that in its small way.

One of the first things to observe about sex is that our personal experience of sex, as individuals, HAS to be both similar to others and also different.

There are fundamental features of sex that we have in common with others, beginning with the most obvious physical similarities, but extending to other aspects of our being too: for example, our emotional and psychological life.

At the same time, because it involves our own unique personal perception and our "interpretation" of our own experience (how we understand it, how we think about it) -- which is shaped by all our previous experiences and by the lenses through which we look at reality -- our sexual activity has to be unique as well.

We have to do justice to both aspects, not treating sex as if it were purely personal and idiosyncratic or as if everyone's experience were basically the same.